He always looks forward to it. “They’re very engaged, and it’s fun to answer questions about my experience … as a business student and somebody who’s immersing into the corporate world,” he said.

Cintron is one of several Gabelli students involved in a program that seeks, among other things, to increase diversity at the Gabelli School by attracting more students from underrepresented groups. Dubbed the Corporate Communications High School Pipeline Program, it’s a way of engaging with Fordham’s New York City community and giving students an opportunity to serve and learn from others, in keeping with the University’s Jesuit mission.

It operates mostly at Catholic high schools. Cintron, a student co-director of the pipeline program, took part in it himself while attending one of those high schools, Cardinal Hayes High School in the Bronx. That makes his teaching especially rewarding, he said. “The program, honestly, gave me the confidence that I would succeed in business, so it’s nice to be able to spread that confidence to other students.”

Because of its potential for enhancing diversity at Fordham by attracting more students from the Bronx, one of the most diverse areas in the United States, “I’m really proud to be part of the program,” Cintron said.

Helping more students from underrepresented communities come to Fordham is one goal of the University’s current $350 million fundraising campaign, Cura Personalis | For Every Fordham Student. To advance this effort, donors have been contributing to the recently established Gabelli Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Scholarship Fund for academically strong students who, like Cintron, came through the pipeline program.

Creating a High School to University Pipeline

Founded five years ago, the pipeline program prepares students for business school through mentoring, corporate site visits, a class on the Fordham campus, and a pitch proposal competition. Working in teams, students at each school devise a strategy for addressing an issue of diversity, equity, and inclusion that arose in a Fortune 500 company. The winning strategy is chosen by a panel of judges drawn from industry.

The class taught by Cintron and other students helps the high schoolers prepare for this competition. Cintron’s fellow student co-director, Luz Perez-Arias, said it’s “amazing” to teach the class because of the students’ eagerness and the research, public speaking, and presentation skills they’re learning. She came through the pipeline program herself as a student at Aquinas High School, which has since closed.

“When these kids learn these skills, they’re going to appreciate it so much when they go to college, because this is something that I’m doing now” as a Gabelli School sophomore, she said. “I know that they’re going to make use out of it, and that makes me happy.”

Cintron and Perez-Arias are recipients of the Gabelli diversity scholarship. It has several contributors, including two lead donors who, as it happens, know what it’s like to be part of an underrepresented group themselves.

Benefactors with Bronx Roots

Eileen Walsh, GABELLI ’76, and Mary Ann Bartels, GABELLI ’85, GSAS ’92, both became supporters of the scholarship via Fordham’s giving circles, a form of participatory philanthropy that grew out of the University’s annual Women’s Summit, for which Bartels has been a keynote speaker.

They were both drawn to support the scholarship because of their own stories. Walsh, a Bronx native and daughter of Irish immigrants, graduated from the Bronx’s Academy of Mt. St. Ursula, now one of the pipeline schools. After graduating from the Gabelli School, she secured a “Big 8” accounting firm job at a time when such a thing was unusual for women.

“I do give credit to Fordham and the Gabelli School for helping me succeed,” she said, “in a very serious position that not many women had at the time.”

She serves as a judge for the pitch competition at the Academy of Mt. St. Ursula and calls it “magical” to see how the students grow through the program.

“They are way ahead of the game,” said Walsh, a retired audit partner at KPMG and member of the Gabelli School advisory board’s executive committee. “They have an idea of what business is, they have an idea of what successful companies are, they have an idea of how poorly and how well the companies may have done because of what they did or didn’t do—and they can give a presentation that will knock your socks off. They effectively know how to work as a team, which in business is huge.”

Bartels also grew up in the Bronx, on City Island. A self-described “risk student,” she was accepted with the help of a strong recommendation from a neighbor who worked at Fordham. “Fordham took a chance on me,” said Bartels, chief investment strategist at Sanctuary Wealth, who believes she would not have had a successful Wall Street career without the help of the University’s faculty and administrators.

She has been giving back to the University for years—as a donor and a member of advisory boards and the President’s Council. The Gabelli scholarship fund caught her interest because she’s well aware of the community it serves. “It’s part of the area that I grew up in, so it really touched my heart,” she said. “To be able to give back to other people in the community that have gifts and talents and can go to, really, an elite institution to further their ability and skillset and interest really appealed to me.”

Cultivating Diversity in Business

There’s “a huge pedagogical imperative” to having greater diversity among Gabelli School students, said Clarence E. Ball III, the school’s director of diversity, equity, and inclusion, who founded and still directs the pipeline program. “Learning outcomes for all students—at the Gabelli School and at the high schools—are increased when they have access to a diverse range of human perspectives,” he said.

Ultimately, businesses need greater diversity in their ranks as they seek to be more socially responsible, he said. “If you want to be an agent for change in society, you need all perspectives of the society in order to be an agent of that change.”

To inquire about giving to any area of the University, please contact Michael Boyd, senior associate vice president for development and university relations, at 212-636-6525 or [email protected]. Learn more about Cura Personalis | For Every Fordham Student, a campaign to reinvest in every aspect of the Fordham student experience.

Those words from keynote speaker Mary Ann Bartels, GABELLI ’85, GSAS ’92, summed up the sentiment at the fourth annual Fordham Women’s Summit: Philanthropy | Empowerment | Change, held on Oct. 21. The annual summit is an opportunity for women across Fordham to focus on philanthropy, leadership, personal growth, and professional development. This year, the virtual event drew more than 400 Fordham alumnae, parents, faculty, and friends who tuned in from locations around the globe. From the comfort of their own homes, they listened to expert financial advice and heard from four panels that explored topics like personal resilience, maintaining a career—and a household—amid a pandemic, and relinquishing the need for perfection.

A key theme of the summit was the importance of investing at a young age and learning how to create a plan for personal finances and philanthropy. In her keynote speech “Turning Financial Literacy into Philanthropy,” Bartels broke down complex topics in finance and offered advice for women that spanned generations. 

Bartels spent more than three decades on Wall Street, where she developed research that helped advisers and clients make better investment decisions. She worked for more than 20 years at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, where she was known as a thought leader, and she’s appeared frequently on CNBC, Bloomberg, and Fox Business. 

She opened her speech with a few powerful statistics, including the percentage growth of women-owned businesses. 

“When we look at the employment that they are creating over the last five years, that’s actually up 8% compared to [the growth of]  all businesses of 2%. And when we look at women of color in the businesses that they are developing, their growth rate is at 43%,” Bartels said. “So not only will women have financial power—they’re creating new financial power.” 

Riding Out the Market Cycles

Bartels explained the big ideas behind finances to help her audience make better financial decisions. 

Markets have cycles that are generally controlled by fear and greed, she said. But more importantly, they tend to move in an upward trend. Long cycles tend to last 18 to 20 years, and the good news is that the most recent “uptrend” started in 2013, she said. She predicted that the U.S. will see at least one more decade of markets that reach new highs. But she also stressed that it’s critical to hold on to some investments even when the markets tank. 

“I can’t tell you the countless clients that came out during the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009 and never put money back in the markets again. Markets, I can guarantee you, will always go down. Do they always go down 50%? No. Will they go down 50% again? Yes, because that is the power of markets. That’s the power of fear and greed,” Bartels said. “But the diversified portfolio? If you hold it over time, you add to it over time, you collect dividends over time, that’s where the compounding and growth comes from … It’s called patience.” 

Perhaps most importantly, she urged the audience to start saving, investing, and growing their assets at an early age. 

“Build a solid financial foundation for yourself before you have any significant percentage of your assets given to someone else,” Bartels stressed. 

First Steps Into Philanthropy 

When you’re ready to start giving, ask your parents or family members about their financial advisers and find someone trustworthy who will listen to your needs, Bartels said.

“There are many advisers that will want to sit there and lecture you on what you should do, but they don’t listen to what you need or what’s important to you,” Bartels said. 

Bartels parceled out other pieces of philanthropic advice: Invest in things that are important to you, your community, and the world. Contribute, but don’t overextend. Consider seven key categories: family, finances, health, home, work, leisure, and giving. Don’t be afraid to ask charities how exactly your money will be spent. Finally, imagine your individual power as a single voice or instrument. 

“It’s beautiful to listen to one voice. But when you take a choir and listen to all the voices, it just magnifies—or if you take one instrument and you start blending in more instruments and creating a symphony, how much more powerful that becomes,” Bartels said. “Become that instrument to create that symphony that can have that impact [on]  what is important to you.” 

Honoring Pioneering Women

At the beginning of the summit, three accomplished women in the Fordham community were honored as “Pioneering Women in Philanthropy”: Mary Heyser, R.S.H.M., MC ’62 and Monica Kevin, O.S.U., UGE ’48, GSAS ’61, ’64, who were honored posthumously, and Regina Pitaro, FCRH ’76. 

The Impact of Scholarship Gifts

The event’s student scholar speaker, Taylor Bell, a sophomore studying international studies at Fordham College at Rose Hill and a member of the rowing team, spoke about how scholarship giving can help level the playing field. 

“Without scholarship support, there would be very few students of color at this institution,” said Bell, a recipient of the William Loschert and Paul Guenther endowed scholarships. “There’s such a gap between the marginalized and privileged in our community, and within that gap exists an opportunity to both educate those who have not known a life with such limitations and to expose possibilities to those who have been on the outside looking in for far too long.” 

Women are more likely to feel compounded economic impacts, adverse health effects due to the reallocation of health care resources and priorities, and an increase in unpaid “care work,” such as taking care of children or elderly parents, the report concluded.

That’s one of the reasons why this year’s Fordham Women’s Summit: Philanthropy | Empowerment | Change will feature panels and speakers addressing financial literacy, COVID-19 work trends, personal resilience, and modern home economics.

“The Fordham Women’s Summit is a unique opportunity for Fordham alumnae, faculty, and friends to discuss and celebrate their achievements as leaders, activists, and philanthropists, as well as attend professional and personal development sessions,” the event description reads.

The fourth annual summit, which will be held virtually for the first time, will take place on Wednesday, Oct. 21, beginning at 10 a.m. EDT.

Mary Ann Bartels, GABELLI ’85, GSAS ’92, who most recently served as the head of the Research Investment Committee and exchange-traded fund strategy at Bank of America Securities, will be the keynote speaker.

Bartels said through her talk she will aim to “encourage and empower women to achieve financial freedom,” and to help them understand their impact and force in the economy, and how they can learn to use that power to support causes and philanthropic interests that matter most to them.

A series of four panel discussions will offer attendees concrete strategies to deal with the current economic and social stresses:

Building Personal Resilience: Yes I Can! Yes We Can!
Career Outlook: COVID-19 Trends & Perspectives
Perfection Intervention: Finding Strength in Letting Go
“Who’s the Boss?”: Perspectives on Modern Home Economics

The summit will also honor three Pioneering Women in Philanthropy at Fordham—Regina Pitaro, FCRH ’76, managing director of GAMCO Investors Inc.; the late Mary Heyser, R.S.H.M., MC ’62, former Marymount College alumnae chaplain; and the late Monica Kevin, O.S.U., UGE ’48, GSAS ’61, ’64, a longtime biology professor who was the first woman to lead the Faculty Senate at Fordham.

This year’s virtual summit is free to attend, but summit organizers encourage attendees to consider supporting Fordham students by joining a Women’s Giving Circle or making a one-time gift to another area of the University. For more information and to register, visit fordham.edu/womenssummit.

“What my aunt kept teaching me was that I could do whatever I wanted to,” says Bartels, who began her own career on Wall Street in the 1980s. “She empowered me not to be intimidated just because I was a woman.”

Bartels grew up on City Island in the Bronx and attended community college before transferring to Fordham, where she deepened her newfound passion for analyzing the economy as “a puzzle with a lot of different moving parts.” She graduated with a bachelor’s degree from the Gabelli School of Business in 1985 and later earned a master’s degree in economics at Fordham’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

Today, Bartels is a leading investment strategist with a knack for explaining financial concepts to the general public. As head of the Research Investment Committee and of exchange traded fund strategy at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, she has often shared her expertise on outlets like CNBC. And she continues to come back to Fordham, she says, because “they gave me a chance.”

As a member of the President’s Council, Bartels has been a guest lecturer in classes and for the Smart Women Securities club, and has served as a judge at a Shark Tank-inspired event hosted by the Gabelli School. On October 23, she’ll be attending Fordham’s third annual Women’s Philanthropy Summit, where she’ll participate in a panel discussion titled “A View from the Top: Reflections on Success and Coaching the Next Generation of Women Leaders.” It’s an important event to her, she says, because “it’s women supporting women.”

“It’s nice that Fordham is creating an environment where women can come together and share their success and do good for whatever their cause is,” she says.

“You know, women have come a long way,” Bartels says, “yet we have a lot more to do. Many women used to be hostage to a husband and their views on how to use their wealth. Now women have their own finances and their own voice. But we still represent very small ratios in most lines of business.”

That’s why continuing to engage in mentorship is also important to Bartels. “For women and men alike, how do we grow without mentorship? It’s a way of giving back,” she says.

That desire to give back is something she sees in her daughter, Lorraine, a first-year student at Fordham College at Rose Hill. Bartels says that her daughter was most attracted to Fordham’s ethos of engaging with surrounding communities. She started her Fordham experience with Urban Plunge, an optional pre-orientation program run by the University’s Center for Community Engaged Learning where students participate in community-enriching programs throughout the Bronx and Manhattan.

“She is absolutely thriving,” Bartels says of Lorraine. “And I get to see Fordham in a new way—as a parent.”

What are you most passionate about?
At the end of the day, what’s most important to me are my two children. My main responsibility is to be a mother; it has to be.

My second passion, at least professionally, is that I love to assist people with their finances. I love sitting down and helping a client understand what they have and how we can get them to where they want to go.

Another passion I have, and something I’m really learning as I get older, is how to stay healthy and have a health program for longevity, starting with diet. In your 20s, you feel like you’re invincible; you snap back like a rubber band. In your 30s you still think you’re invincible, but you start to learn that the rubber band doesn’t snap back quite as fast. By the time you’re 40, the rubber band does not always snap back. And by the time you’re 50, you really need to have everything together.

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?
My Aunt Bernadette taught me the value of networking, and how a lot of life is about networking and meeting people. But I didn’t appreciate it until it worked for me. When I look at my past, through Wall Street, a lot of it was connected by people I met through the years and who I stayed in touch with, who became my friends within the industry both inside and outside my company. As you go through your career, you need a mentor, right? But you also need what’s called sponsorship, people that you work with who say “you are adding value to our business.” So you never know who that might be.

On a personal level, and we’ve all heard this from many different avenues, another piece of advice that has been important has been “learn how to accept yourself, take care of yourself, and love yourself.” As you get older and wiser, you really start understanding why that was said to you so often. You’re pulled in so many different directions, especially women, and many of us struggle with that. How many women have said, “Yeah, I just don’t do anything for myself.” And then they end up unhappy. You have to love yourself enough to take care of yourself. Or you can’t help anybody, you can’t be at the top of your game. And even if you get there, you can’t enjoy it.

What’s your favorite place in New York City? In the world?
My favorite place in the world is Alaska, the pristine and absolute beauty of the nature there. Especially in the winter. I get there and it’s my happy place. I’ve been there many times, fished there, seen whales and porpoises, been out on glaciers. The people are wonderful and grounded. It’s all about loving and being with nature.

My favorite place in New York is harder. I think it would be Battery Park. I worked down there for many years. My office was overlooking the water and I took the ferry twice a day. And I just loved being there on the river.

Name a book that has had a lasting influence on you.
So this is probably going to be very odd. Early in my career, my aunt told me to take this course on technical analysis. And the book we had to get for it was Technical Analysis of the Financial Markets by the teacher, John Murphy. When I read that book in that course, I was like, “This is it for me.” It changed my life; it gave me confidence that I could actually do it. He wrote it in a way that I could understand. For me, that was a light bulb moment.

Who is the Fordham grad or professor you admire most?
I’m going to say economics professor Dominick Salvatore. Not only is the man brilliant, and not only does he write great textbooks, he teaches in a way that makes economics exciting. It completely lights up, and he has this magnetism that comes through in his teaching. He’s great at taking concepts and explaining them so any student can understand. And that’s an important part of what I have to do in my work now, take the most complex situation or topics and be able to explain them to any audience.